Cheyenne Mountain Complex

Colorado

A single bad computer chip inside Cheyenne Mountain once issued false warnings that a missile attack had begun.

militaryhistoricalengineering

In 1979 and 1980, the computers buried inside Cheyenne Mountain told the United States that missiles were coming. They were wrong. One chip went haywire and generated false missile warnings, raising the possibility that a nuclear war could start by accident, on bad data. Staff dug through the numbers and found the warnings were erroneous. The systems were rewritten to catch false alarms, and a bad chip was replaced after another failure in 1980. The Air Force general in charge said his main job was to give Washington timely, unambiguous, reliable warning that a raid on North America had begun. He pointed out that the complex handled about sixty-seven hundred messages in an average hour across those two years, and processed all of them without error. After that scare, NORAD built a testing facility in Colorado Springs so software changes could be tried out away from the live system before going into production.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
a computer chip "went haywire" and issued false missile warnings, which raised the possibility that a nuclear war could be started accidentally, based on incorrect data

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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